Doppiozero Essay Revisits Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution and the "Life of Matter"

Published on Doppiozero on 19 October 2026, the essay "La creatività della materia" by Felice Cimatti and Anita Romanello turns on Henri Bergson's claim, made in L'evoluzione creatrice (1907), that "time is invention." The French philosopher, described in the piece as the most brilliant philosopher of science of the twentieth century, argued that once one encounters true duration, it becomes evident that duration means creation — a creation identical with the "life of the real." For the authors, the most contemporary aspect of Bergson's book is the breadth of that life, which extends well beyond what is still called "life" in a far narrower sense. What is at stake is the life of matter itself, situated well before the distinction — scientifically unfounded, the text asserts — between inorganic and organic matter. This life coincides with what Bergson names "durata": the uninterrupted temporal movement that, as such, produces and cannot fail to produce the "invention" of new material forms, meaning new life in this extended sense. The essay frames duration as generative rather than merely passing, tying Bergsonian metaphysics to the emergence of material form.